Local Book Notes: Memoir Wars - Drummer vs. Kristin Cavallari

"Chicago Review Press has set a May 1 release date for Stick It!: My Life Of Sex, Drums, And Rock 'N' Roll, the new autobiography from legendary rock drummer Carmine Appice," Blabbermouth reports.

"The book was co-written by Ian Gittins, who wrote The Heroin Diaries with Motley Cure bassist Nikki Sixx.

"Official book description: 'Carmine Appice has enjoyed a jaw-dropping rock-and-roll life - and now he is telling his scarcely believable story. Appice ran with teenage gangs in Brooklyn before becoming a global rock star in the Summer of Love, managed by the Mob.

"He hung with Hendrix, unwittingly paid for an unknown Led Zeppelin to support him on tour, taught John Bonham to play drums (and helped Fred Astaire too), and took part in Zeppelin's infamous deflowering of a groupie with a mud shark.

"After enrolling in Rod Stewart's infamous Sex Police, he hung out with Kojak, accidentally shared a house with Prince, was blood brothers with Ozzy Osbourne and was fired by Sharon.

"He formed an all-blond hair-metal band, jammed with John McEnroe and Steven Seagal, got married five times, slept with 4,500 groupies - and, along the way, became a rock legend by single-handedly reinventing hard rock and heavy metal drumming.

"His memoir, Stick It!, is one of the most extraordinary and outrageous rock-and-roll books of the early twenty-first century."

Wordless Classics
"Nicholas Rougeux is a designer and artist from Chicago who decided to see what it would look like if all the words were removed from classic pieces of literature," Wiredreports.

"The result is Between The Words, a series of posters that celebrates the dots, dashes, and quotation marks sprinkled throughout iconic literary works. Rougeux started making his swirling designs by pulling in the text of all nine books from Project Gutenberg. From there he used a software called RegExr to strip the text of words, line breaks, spaces and numbers, leaving just lines of shapes and symbols that he would later swirl into a vortex of typographical confetti."

Making Book
"If you love to bet on the ponies, then in Bookmaking, Horse Racing, and Sports Betting: An American History, Arne K. Lang you'll get a sweeping overview of legal and illegal sports and race betting in the United States, from the first thoroughbred meet at Saratoga in 1863 through the modern day," Rowman & Littlefield says.

"The cultural war between bookmakers and their adversaries is a recurring theme, as bookmakers were often forced into the shadows during times of social reform, only to bloom anew when the time was ripe. While much of bookmaking's history takes place in New York, other locales such as Chicago, Las Vegas, and Atlantic City - not to mention Cyberspace - are also discussed in this volume."

The book is due out in July.

Map Rap
"With The Curious Map Book, Ashley Baynton-Williams gathers an amazing, chronologically ordered variety of cartographic gems, mainly from the vast collection of the British Library," the University of Chicago Press says.

"He has unearthed a wide array of the whimsical and fantastic, from maps of board games to political ones, maps of the Holy Land to maps of the human soul. In his illuminating introduction, Baynton-Williams also identifies and expounds upon key themes of map production, peculiar styles, and the commerce and collection of unique maps. This incredible volume offers a wealth of gorgeous illustrations for anyone who is cartographically curious."

"The most eye-catching selections in The Curious Map Book, however, are a series of anthropomorphic maps from the 19th century that satirize the geopolitical tensions of the era," Joshua Hammer writes for the New York Times.

"One exquisite creation, drawn by the lithographic artist and caricaturist Joseph John Goggins, probably in Dublin, in 1870, portrays Europe as a menagerie of grotesque humans and beasts in sometimes bellicose ­poses.

"Prussia, an obese Bismarckian figure wearing a Pickel­haube - a spiked military helmet - has one fat knee in the chest of a prostrate Austria while thrusting the other toward a bearded, alarmed France. (This was just before the outbreak of the Franco-­Prussian War.)

"An indolent Turkey, portrayed as a veiled young woman, sucks languorously on an opium pipe; to the east, a simian Russia bares its teeth and threatens to gobble up the rest of the continent.

"In much the same vein, two anthropomorphic maps from the turn of the 20th century portray imperial Russia - then wrestling with Britain in the Great Game and preparing for war with Japan - as an octopus, its tentacles reaching toward both Europe and Asia.

"'China feels the power of her suckers,' proclaims the legend in a 1900 cartoon by Fred W. Rose, 'and two of her tentacles are invidiously creeping towards Persia and Afghanistan, while another is feeling for any vantage where Turkey may be once more ­attacked.'"